Valentina Akpan: Founder, Rellatech. Admin and technical virtual assistant for businesses and startups with teams.
· 3 min read
Claire Savage at the Associated Press has a piece out this week on what is happening to administrative assistants as AI spreads through offices, and it landed alongside fresh Labor Department numbers released on Thursday showing unemployment for office and administrative support workers sitting at 4 percent, up from 3.6 percent a year ago and moving in the wrong direction.
The longer view is worse: in 2004 there were about 3.5 million secretaries and administrative assistants in the United States, nearly all of them women, and twenty years later that number has fallen to 2.1 million even as the overall workforce grew, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics projecting the decline to continue across every subsector except medical admin.
A Brookings Institution report from January adds another layer, showing that clerical and administrative workers are more exposed to AI displacement than most professionals, partly because many are further along in their careers, have limited savings, or are specialized in one narrow skill set, and about 86 percent of the roughly 6 million people in these roles are women.
What the numbers leave out
Something the coverage understates: the assistants Claire Savage spoke to are not losing their jobs to AI at all. They are using it, and in most cases they are the ones inside the office figuring out how it should be deployed.
An executive assistant at Vanderbilt University told the AP she now hands her meeting notes to AI so she can be present in the room instead of transcribing while the conversation moves on without her, and work that used to take her a whole afternoon now takes a few minutes, while Fiona Young, a former executive assistant who now trains others on AI, said in the same piece that demand for her sessions has risen sharply since 2023 and she has run them inside Google, Amazon, and Salesforce.
Oana Manolache, the CEO of Sequel.io, wrote on LinkedIn a while back that she would fire anyone on her team who refused to use AI, and in the same AP interview she also said AI could not replace her own executive assistant because that assistant uses AI to clear out the repetitive tasks, which frees her up for the parts that really matter: judgment calls, relationships, and understanding how the whole company fits together.
The job that was mostly typing, transcribing, and calendar management is fading, and the job that is staying, and in some cases growing, is the assistant who runs your operations, knows the tools, and thinks with you.
What this means if you run a business
Assistants are not going away, the bar has simply moved, and the repetitive work is cheap now because anyone can get a rough version of it done in an afternoon, so what is hard to find is someone who will take ownership of your inbox, your calendar, your CRM, and your follow-ups, and exercise real judgment across all of it, which is the version of the role I deliver through my executive assistant services at Rellatech.
The AP piece also notes something I see constantly, which is that a lot of assistants want to use AI in their work but never get the time or training to figure it out, and when you work with me you do not have to solve that yourself because I already work this way and bring the tooling with me.
If you need proper support but do not want to run a hiring cycle and add a full-time seat, a Rellatech monthly retainer gives businesses and startups with existing teams an assistant who handles the operational load and keeps getting better at it, so you and your team can stay on the work only you can do.
Get an assistant who works this way
I run monthly retainers for businesses and teams who need an operator, not a typist. You can see how they are structured on the pricing page, or book a consultation and we will talk through what your version looks like.
Book a ConsultationNot ready for a call? Take the free operations assessment and I will send you a written breakdown within 24 hours.
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